Elon Musk’s $158 billion Tesla pay was 2.5 million times his workers’ salary last year—it’s ‘unlike anything we have seen before,’ exec pay watch says

America is in the middle of a tech-fueled wealth boom: companies have shattered market-cap records, while soaring stock briefly minted the world’s first trillionaire.

Now, some CEOs leading the world’s biggest companies are making money so fast that they can earn their workers’ annual pay in a matter of seconds.

Elon Musk earned the typical Tesla worker’s annual pay every 4.23 seconds.

The richest person in the world and CEO of tech and EV giant Tesla received $158.3 billion in compensation last year.

His pay was 2,522,203 times higher than the median Tesla’s employee pay of $57,243 annually, according to an executive paywatch analysis from America’s largest federation of labor unions, AFL-CIO.

During a typical 30-minute commute, he’s already banked $24.36 million in compensation.

Brandon Rees, lead researcher for executive paywatch at AFL-CIO, tells Fortune the organization has been tracking CEO pay levels since 1997, and “Elon Musk’s gargantuan 2025 pay package at Tesla is unlike anything we have seen before. ” “Our economy is increasingly out of balance because billionaires like Elon Musk are taking a greater share of the economic pie while working people are struggling to make ends meet,” he added.

To put the inequality into context, while Musk is earning 2.5 million times more than his workforce, the average S&P CEO earns 312 times their workers.

Fortune reached out to Tesla for comment.

Musk’s 2025 pay was 14 times higher than all other S&P 500 company CEOs combined Musk’s pay represents the largest disparity among all company CEOs analyzed.

His 2025 total compensation was calculated from the grant-date fair value of restricted Tesla stock awarded to him that same year, which could ultimately be worth up to $1 trillion if the company hits performance requirements that Musk needs to earn them.

It’s an eye-watering compensation package that “broke the CEO pay curve,” the AFL-CIO researcher says.

Most CEOs of S&P 500 companies earned more in one day than the average U.S. worker takes home in one year—but Musk dwarfs the entire collective.

His 2025 Tesla pay package was 14 times higher than the total compensation of all other S&P 500 company CEOs combined, the report found.